Emancipating early childhood literacy curricula: Pro-Black teaching in K-3 classrooms

Abstract

The legacy of colonization includes stereotypes and misinformation about African and African descendant people as well as a void in an understanding the vast contributions of precolonial Africa to the world’s knowledge impacting knowledge, languages, music, art, and sciences that we take for granted today. This misinformation remains pervasive throughout society perpetuated in schools by ensuring that curriculum is dominated by whiteness and lacks attention to the histories, heritages, communities, and languages of Black people. Pro-Black practices in response to centuries-old curricular voids and misinformation about Africa, the African Diaspora, and African descendant people can lead to an emancipatory education for all students. In our work, we draw on tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy and descriptions of Pro-Black pedagogy to describe the work of 13 early childhood educators who are committed to using their knowledge from ongoing professional development at one school in the southeastern United States. The work represented in this article reflects data collected over four years and analyzed in answer to the question: What are Pro-Black highlights of teaching in one school which sought to develop and normalize culturally relevant teaching including challenges to the work and efforts to negotiate those challenges? Data (e.g. student work, lesson plans, PD session PowerPoints, participants’ responses to a questionnaire, informal commentaries throughout the PD process, and classroom observations) were collected and reviewed to develop this article. Recommendations are made for educators and scholars.

Identifying anti-Blackness and committing to Pro-Blackness in early literacy pedagogy and research: A guide for child care settings, schools, teacher preparation programs, and researchers

“…Given supportive contexts, they can show us the way as in Justin Coles' (2020) exploration of students resisting "anti-Blackness [by expressing] a fierce love for Blackness" (p. 475) through their writing, research, discussions, artistic expression. While Coles' work focuses on older students, Pro-Black expressions can also be found in the work of young children as they respond to acts of anti-Black police violence, study precolonial African greatness, react to the work of activists throughout time, embrace Black music and art-all as foundational to their literacy experiences found in a range of publications depicting their work with Pro-Black teachers (Baines et al, 2018;Boutte et al, 2021;Braden et al, 2022;Bryan, 2022;Nash et al, 2022;Wynter-Hoyte et al, 2022).…”